It is well known in the prior art to use business rules in application programs that are executed in computers, as described in an article entitled “Smart Business Processes using Oracle Business Rules”, by Gary Hallmark, 16 pages, published December 2008 that is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety as background. This article describes application logic that is modeled visually in Oracle JDeveloper and deployed to Oracle Fusion Middleware, featuring Oracle WebLogic application servers. Such application logic can be designed, changed, and understood by business people as well as IT (information technology) people. Oracle JDeveloper 11g is a tool that can be used for modeling business terms, rules, and processes. Modeling is an iterative activity. A new rule might require a new business term or specify an outcome that requires a change to the business process. Integrated tools make business analysts more productive. Hence, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the prior art can be used to prepare and/or modify such rules.
Moreover, prior art application programs, such as compensation software applications used by corporations to manage salaries and bonuses of their employees may use formulae written in a proprietary language, using a tool called “Fast Formula” in Oracle Human Resource Management System (HRMS), as described in the book “Oracle FastFormula User's Guide”, Release 11.0, Part No. A58346-01, published 1995, pages 105, that is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety as background. Oracle FastFormula can get values for the variables in three ways: (1) receive them as input when the formula is called, (2) find the values in the database from database items, (3) use global values, which are entered in a Globals window. To get values from database items, the user clicks on a “Show Items” button in a formula window to display a window of available database items. The user must then copy and paste items from this window into a window in which the formula is being composed (“Edit Formula” window).
For illustrative details on prior art application programs, see the US Patent Application Publication 2010/0198634 A1 by Ty Hayden et al. entitled “Dynamic Calculations in an Employee Compensation System” published Aug. 5, 2010 that is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, as background.
Such prior art methods have several drawbacks. Many such application programs are proprietary, with capabilities limited to certain software available at the time of development of these application programs. Moreover, such application programs may be integrated at the back end with software of other technologies, such as PL/SQL and/or relational databases, which can making these tools inefficient for use in other environments, such as Java.
Furthermore, software of such prior art application programs is typically compiled and deployed, which makes it difficult to change instructions therein, because any change to instructions requires re-compilation and re-deployment of the application program, resulting in long delays in its use in production computer systems. Such software may be customized in a limited manner by use of property files and/or command-line input used by instructions of the application program. However, to the knowledge of the current inventor, there appears to be no good solution in the prior art, to enable changes to instructions of an application while deployed, as described below.